Rugged individualism has been a hallmark of Chatham ever since William Nickerson ignored protocol, and the law, when he purchased land near Ryder's Cove from the Monomoyicks in 1656. The fishermen who defined the town through the centuries plied the sea on their own, and even today residents cherish the independence that contributes to the town's unique character.

So, too, did the artists who chose to live and work in Chatham over the centuries, doing so as individuals, drawn here by the scenery, the light or the people rather than any organized art movement or school.

“It was not like Provincetown,” said Atwood House archivist Mary Anne Gray. “They were pretty much individuals operating on their own.”

Chatham's art heritage will be celebrated with “Chatham in Art Over Time,” an exhibit at the Creative Arts Center on Crowell Road. Running from Oct. 8 to 31, the exhibit features 53 works by artists who lived and painted here, drawn from the collections of the Atwood House Museum, the Cape Cod Museum of Art and private owners.

The show is limited to artists who are no longer living, said Hank Russian, president of the Cape Cod Museum of Art board of directors and a Chatham resident.

“We have so many incredibly talented artists who are still living in Chatham, if we had all the artists, it would be a gigantic show,” he said.

The exhibit features work by acknowledged masters such as Harold Brett, Charles Cahoon, Robert Clem, Alice Stallknecht and her son Frederick Wight. Other artists represented who are likely to be familiar to local residents include John Hare, Wendell Rogers, Calvin Hammond and Marion Chisholm. In all, 20 artists are represented.

The idea came to Russian last year as a way for the Cape Cod Museum of Art to contribute to the town's 300th anniversary celebration. “I began to look around the churches in town, town hall and our paintings by people from Chatham, like (Harold) Dunbar and (Margaret) Patterson,” he said. He visited the Atwood House Museum and spoke with then-director Mark Wilkins, who opened up that museum's archives, which Russian said were “fantastic” and “very powerful.”

A proponent of museums working together, Russian invited the Atwood House Museum to participate in an exhibit showcasing the Chatham works. The next step was finding gallery space, preferably in town. Since he'd taken courses at the Creative Arts Center, he approached then-director Sally Lamson believing it was “the perfect space.”

Meanwhile, Ginny Nickerson and Carol Odell helped locate paintings in private hands that could contribute to the exhibit, said CAC Director Angela Zoni Mault. “That's how we got some of the Robert Clem pieces,” she noted. Officials from all three institutions help choose the final 53 paintings for the exhibit, which will take up all of the CAC's gallery space.

Paintings include both landscapes and portraits of local residents. A portrait of ship captain Ziba Eldredge by an unknown folk artist is contrasted with the expressionistic, unvarnished portrayals of local working people by Stallknecht, whose most famous work is the “Christ Preaching to the Multitude” mural at the Atwood House.

“There's people working, portraits, men fishing and hunting, just a lot of different things,” Mault said. “I like that there are activities going on. It really shows life in Chatham.”

The paintings date from the late 19th century to the mid to late 20th century and cover a variety of styles from primitive to American Regionalism to the realism of Clem's avian paintings. The earliest painting is an 1885 oil of the twin lighthouses by Calvin Hammond; Winthrop Clapp captured scenes of similar landmarks in the 1970s. There are also paintings that will be familiar to many, including Harold Brett's painting of horses pulling a sleigh past the Congregational Church, and the popular mermaids and sailors of Ralph Cahoon, a Chatham native.

In the catalog for a 2001 Atwood Museum show of Chatham painters called “Picturing Chatham,” then-curator Ernest Rohdenburg wrote that it was hard to find common features, other than subject, among Chatham artists. While some of the artists also taught, Chatham was never considered an art colony. The town also didn't have the multicultural influence that Provincetown enjoyed.

“Instead, Chatham was a smaller, quieter, more homogeneous community with a more challenging and perhaps, to some, a more picturesque landscape,” Rohdenburg wrote. Chatham's environment was also constantly in flux due to the ocean and unforgiving weather. “This may account for the generally straightforward, documentary approach to the subject matter” of local artists. “Perhaps the ever-changing nature of the Chatham landscape was felt to be universally understood and therefore an accepted metaphor for the pervasive changes in American society that the artists (and viewers) saw taking place around them.”

Russian said he hopes that visitors to the exhibit, which is open to the public free of charge, will sense the strong bond between the works and the past, and also appreciate and understand the tradition that living artists have inherited.